Burglars must do community service AFTER serving their time - not as part of it

It is just over two years since I was burgled. The thief had obviously seen my wife and baby son go out and used that opportunity to steal a crowbar from the shed next door, prize open a window and climb in.

It was what the police sometimes like to refer to as an ‘opportunity crime’. It was also a spectacularly inept one, as he made so much noise that the profoundly deaf man who lived next door heard him and chased him away as he ran back out of the house.In some respects we were lucky.

The ineptitude of the individual tempered the sense of loss and invasion that many less fortunate than us experience. For example, although they stole our son’s first moneybox, they probably did so thinking that it was full of pound coins and not the pennies and tuppences that we had filled it with. Similarly, they dropped and smashed the only valuable thing they did take, my wife’s laptop, so we got a new laptop out of it, too.

Burglars should only be jailed if they cause property damage or hurt someone, courts have been told (Posed by model)

None of this, though, took away the two basic things which I wanted to happen. I wanted the burglar caught, and I wanted the burglar jailed, preferably for a long time.Now, if the Sentencing Advisory Panel get their way, I’ll have to revise that view should I be burgled again, to something more along the lines of ‘caught, and then sentenced to a short spell of weeding an old lady’s garden, probably whilst he cases every other house in the area for potential targets’.

Don’t get me wrong. I am all in favour of ladies, young and old, having their gardens tended to and I am equally in favour of convicted criminals having the chance to do it. But only after they have served their sentence, not as a part of it. It is a scheme which NACRO, the crime reduction charity, run superbly well.

Before then, though, I want to see the punishment made to fit the crime. And if someone breaks into my house, I want them locked away in a house they can’t break out of, let alone in to.

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One of the big problems with the Sentencing Advisory Panel is that it is chaired by an academic lawyer, Anthony Ashworth QC. Academic lawyers teach law, and theorise about it. Their contact with the real world tends to be limited to (a) students and (b) other academic lawyers. Whilst it might be nice in theory to send all offenders on flower arranging courses, or out picking up litter, it won’t actually teach them not to pinch peoples’ property again.

It’s not only people like me who want burglars to go to jail. Sometimes the burglars themselves do, too. There was a fascinating radio discussion earlier this week in which a former prisoner admitted as much. He had been in care since the age of 12 and, on leaving care, was completely disorientated by being in an unsupervised, uncontrolled environment.

This man ended up committing crimes in order to be sent to prison, because he felt comfortable there. He also confirmed that there were many others like him within the prison system. No amount of community sentencing is going to stop people like that from offending.

Fortunately, there are two fluffy white clouds on the horizon. The first is that the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge, almost certainly has steam coming out of his ears at the implied criticism of his policy of tougher sentencing. If anything is likely to reinforce his views, it is being told he is wrong by a body such as the SAC.

The second is that the SAC is being abolished next month, so we can probably write this off as the deranged wibblings of a body which knows its days are numbered.

To finish where we started, the police did catch my burglar and he did get a long prison term. Sadly, my next door neighbour didn’t live long enough to see that happen, but I think he’d be as happy with the outcome as I was.

Richard O'Hagan is a solicitor based at Brittons Solicitors. He specialises in litigation, media and sports law.